Herman Neuman had to overcome years of almost unbelievable adversities. He explains what we must do to survive as a democratic republic.

I was born in war under a tyrannical dictatorship, and by the time I was eighteen years old, I had also endured killer illnesses, starvation, floggings, homelessness, school failure and slavery. Because I dealt with my harsh realities successfully, in spite of mother, father and scores of lawyers, I not only survived but also prospered. Likewise, if our nation is to survive as a democratic republic, its citizens can no longer ignore their unpleasant realities but must deal with them also.

My own struggles demonstrate what a person can accomplish with knowledge, patience and self-discipline. After World War II, my father founded a very successful architectural practice. But for more than a dozen years, the viscous court battles between my parents were nothing but a mockery of justice. And when it was over, all pieces of my exploded family were completely penniless.

My mother, brother Siggi and I had to squat in a stranger’s attic. No one ever asked us: “Are comfy in your batty, little prison? Is that your mother scavenging in waste piles and garbage cans?”

To keep our sanity, Siggi and I read most of the books in the youth section of an American bookmobile, and many of its adult books as well. For several years we had a magazine route and spent almost all earnings on movies, most of which were about America and its cowboys. Books and movies made our minds eager Americans.

One day, when I was sixteen years old, a real American visited us in our rat’s nest, and invited us to come to the land of our dreams. Months later, while Siggi and I were exiting our apartment building to begin our six thousand-mile journey into the unknown, our mother yelled down from the top story to our overfed and smirking father, that they would never see their children again.

When we arrived at the coast of Washington, our American relatives picked us up at the train station at four o’clock on a Sunday morning and separated us on their dairy farms. Because of the great distance between them, he and I essentially lost contact with each other. Within three hours my uncle, my master, forced me to work in deep mud and fresh manure. Under the threat of punishment, he made me wallow in it. And would never allow me to shower off barnyard products. Showering would take my time and cost him money.

When I was twenty years old, I had to live alone in extreme social isolation and physical deprivation out on a vast tide flat. I did not even have an outhouse. But I lived in one, an extremely dangerous one. Dozens of rodents sprinkled black little pellets all around inside my muddy hut and my master stored dynamite under my bed. Unbeknownst to me, it had become highly unstable and too dangerous to move.

As you will see, I learned the meaning of "is," the significance of reality.

To liberate myself from lonely slavery, I became a criminal, did drugs, and paid back my tormentors. That might have been the modern way. And in retrospect, this behavior would have destroyed me.

Instinctively I took the bulls by their horns like an old-time American. I worked the “toughest job in town,“ in a sawmill, wrestling tons of lumber during night shifts. Often my arms would feel inches longer and my back ready to break.

Thus I wrestled my way through college. In the spirit of America, my dormitory mates gave me one hundred dollars and disguised it as a scholarship. This was my only financial assistance for four years.

After I earned a five-year engineering degree, my new bride and I worked and saved for only eighteen months, to be able to travel around the world. For six months. For the adventures of a lifetime, experiencing castles, bullet trains, taifuns, floating cities, extreme cultures, wealth and deprivation. And our spirits soared in the marvels of God’s creations.

Before I was thirty years old, I had become a proud American, who had achieved his first American dreams.

But I am now also a very concerned American, because of what we are doing to ourselves. This causes me to ask many questions: What are the root causes of our evermore uncivil behavior? Why are we so exuberantly suing each other, like my parents, whose greatest achievement was to drive us from wealth into absolute poverty and to destroy their family?

Why are our youngsters now so angry and hateful that we have to guard them in schools? To protect them from themselves and from each other. Why has the race for accumulating doodads become more important than cuddling wives and children? Why are so many people disconnected from reality and live in denial, fantasy and self-deception? Why are so many so silent, when they feel like screaming?

Many visitors in my audiences have confided in me unbelievable personal horror stories. They are frustrated and feel helpless. Furthermore, too many of us think of ourselves as victims, and expect others, and especially the government to fix our problems. I recommend that everyone reads classic books like “The Road to Serfdom,” by Frederic Hayek, to show you that such an attitude will multiply the very problems we want our government to solve for us.

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been about two hundred years. They progressed through similar cycles, beginning in bondage and moving to spiritual faith. Their last transitional periods were from apathy to dependency and from dependency back to bondage. Because our nation is now in various stages of these end cycles, and in various stages of chaos, we cannot continue treating our festering wounds with more and more band-aid laws and programs. We all must find their causes and eliminate them with drastic measures.

Only with courage, accountability and discipline can we again built a better nation. We must resurrect “Yankee ingenuity” to disprove Chairman Khrushchev’s prediction before the United Nations, that “America will fall like an over-ripe fruit.” We must ignore our many distractions and detractors and wrestle with our individual problems until we solve them. Only then can we soar again, as I did, after I clawed myself to freedom in the Land of Unlimited Opportunities.